Code for America Summit 2018

Breakout Sessions

Helping the Helpers: Data-Driven Support for Community Vulnerabilities

LED BY:

John Ridener, Open Data Community Liason, San Mateo CountyPatrick Hammons, ​Solution Engineer, Esri

DESCRIPTION:

This hands-on workshop will focus on San Mateo County's Community Vulnerability Index (CVI) https://cmo.smcgov.org/cvi as a framework for data driven policy, storytelling, and as a means of supporting community services through mapping and data. The CVI serves as a means of engaging County departments, community-based organizations, and OpenSMC (the local Brigade) to identify potential service gaps and opportunities to connect local organizations to data and create a framework to explore associated data without barriers to data collection. Attendees will participate in a structured exercise to surface topics and community-based organizations they can assist in their missions through the CVI's framework and have an opportunity to work with Esri's Hub, Open Data platform, and ArcGIS online during the workshop.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Brigade leaders/members who are looking for a data-driven way to identify potential projects and community partners based on need and government folks who want to establish a baseline for program evaluation and find data-driven means to identify potential populations and locations of need.

Balancing Transparency and Privacy in Modern Governments

LED BY:

Reed Duecy-Gibbs, Co-Founder and COO, NextRequestJoy Bonaguro, Chief Data Officer, City and County of San Francisco

DESCRIPTION:

The arrival of the internet and the increased ease of access for government records moved the debate around transparency away from concerns about secrecy and has in recent years trended towards issues of privacy. We'll discuss how transparency has changed in the last 10 years and how governments continue to face new legislation that challenges their transparency.

You'll come away from this session with:

A thorough look at how legislation is pushing governments to address new technologies to balance their transparency with privacy.

Ideas on how your agency can put measures in place to manage privacy while at the same time make appropriate information publicly available.

Real-world examples of how your agency can address transparency and privacy issues right now.

Beth Niblock, City of Detroit CIO, faced a challenge. She needed to get critical information to constituents about an array of government programs, but faced a severe digital divide (40% lack internet at home) and residents spoke three primary languages. To ensure that emergency notifications, transit updates, and other critical information reached everyone, she needed to tackle this problem creatively.

Nearly universal adoption of mobile devices and has shifted people’s expectations about how they communicate with all types of organizations, even when internet connectivity is not pervasive. People now expect instant access to information, fast response when they contact an organization, and they want to use their preferred channel. In this session, Ben Parks from Twilio and Beth Niblock from the City of Detroit will discuss how Detroit rapidly developed a new communication system capable of reaching every resident in the city to deliver information when residents need it most.

Learn how New York City used data to create two products, ACCESS NYC and Growing Up NYC, to make social services more accessible—by using simple technology, clear language, mobile-focused design, and usability testing to put vital resources into the hands of more people. Both products are powered by the Benefits and Programs API, a first of its kind open dataset that includes benefit, program, and resource information on health and human services available to New York City residents. ACCESS NYC is also powered by an eligibility rules engine that screens for eligibility for over 30 programs. NYC is currently in the process of opening the rules engine and publicly sharing the standardized elements. The team will demonstrate the integration of these new social service datasets and walk through the standard elements so that they can be replicated in your city.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Health and human service policymakers and program managers and open data managers.

From Policy to Delivery: Implementing the Largest Modern Change to Medicare

What does it mean to govern well in a digital age? The movement of the past few years to bring digital practices into government has moved past just tech and into delivery-driven policy. For the Medicare Quality Payment Program, delivery-driven policy drove a complete evolution of product development at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from contract award to production release. This track shares real-world examples of delivery-driven policy in action today and seeks to inspire the next stories of true 21st century government.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone who wants to learn more about how policy making is intertwined with tech implementation in the federal government.

Safety in the Storm: Economical Defense from Existential Security Threats

LED BY:

Matthew Weaver, Partner, Layer Aleph, Former Rogue Leader, United States Digital Service

DESCRIPTION:

The expensive & inflexible defensive strategies of increasing oversight, data "zones," multiple firewalls, and certified image/software releases have broadly failed to protect systems, users, or citizens. The speaker will share his experience responding to massive, public security failures at the largest government organizations, their partners, and Fortune 50 companies. Come hear the surprising message of hope: the most effective changes for meaningful defense can be easy on the budget and beneficial for administrators, civil servants, support staff, developers, users & citizens. Be relieved, as you learn that your most valuable help can come from a larger, less constrained talent pool than you expected. Be surprised, as you learn that the heretical truths necessary for the of security your organization, or program, number only five.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Government and business executives, program or project leadership, contractor or government development or operations management, developers or operators of any stripe, community organizers, and NGO executives, management, or staff.

Government capability and modernization requires building a safe workspaces. This participatory session is an opportunity for the people working on ending sexual harassment and abuse in civic tech, government, politics and other spheres to connect and collaborate on their work. Each panelist will briefly discuss their work and then break into a workshop format with others that are working on similar efforts, or want to be involved.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone working on similar efforts to address harassment, that wants to be involved, or wants to hear about lessons from each of our specific experiences.

Same Team! Same Team! How We Built a Successful Government - Contractor Relationship at the VA

Government IT projects are a collaboration between public servants and contractors, but most are so fraught with issues that they hardly look like collaborations at all. For more than year, a development team at the VA has produced results using a radically integrated approach. We sit in the same room, we have retrospectives together, we write requirements together. We see ourselves as "one team." Attendees will hear from both the public servant and contractor perspectives, leaving with practical tips for building cross-functional units, and how to give contractors the right problems and the autonomy to solve them.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone involved in delivering government IT projects: public servants who work with contractors, and contractors who work with public servants.

The decennial census count underlies congressional representation, and more than $600 billion of Federal funding decisions. Since the last census in 2010, there has been a marked decline in trust in social institutions, particularly the federal government. When people trust the government less, they are often less likely to respond to government requests for information. In particular, a potential citizenship question on the 2020 census may be of concern to immigrant communities. Finally, a limited budget for communications and outreach at the Federal level makes it crucial that states, cities, and localities are pro-actively involved to make sure their citizens are counted. In this session, we'll talk about the resources available to prepare for the census, and steps that cities, counties, and community based organizations can take to make sure their citizens are engaged and ready to participate.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

State and local government community engagement leaders, and those responsible for local response to the 2020 census. Funders and community-based organizations that work with traditionally undercounted populations, including young children, rural populations, and immigrant communities.

As anyone who has spent time working in or around civic technology knows, there are certain debates that come up time and again. Are we most effective fighting fires or should we work toward changing the culture around design and technology in government? Should we function as consultants, or as specialized innovation teams, or can we make change from the inside as a one-man-band? And ultimately, what is the best way to get stuff done? As Public Interest Technology fellows at New America, we've interviewed more than 70 people in and around government over the last ten months, many working on innovation or digital-service teams, and we’ve got answers. In this session we’ll share what the most effective teams in this space are doing, what works and what doesn’t, and more broadly how the field is thinking and feeling about the hard work we do.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

People in civic tech or who want to be, those on digital service teams or government officials who want to introduce some kind of "innovation" or civic tech/design people, teams, or structures to change how their agency/city/state does business.

Culture change requires a movement, not a mandate--it takes an "all hands on deck" approach. Together, more than 1,000 innovators have banded together to co-create a shared definition of "innovation" in government on Innovation.gov and the Better Government Movement around how to learn, share, and build a 21st century government.

For this session, Presidential Innovation Fellow and Better Government Movement Amy J. Wilson and two other leaders in the Movement will lead you through how a collective movement is co-creating a better government from the inside out that delivers better results at lower cost for the people, by the people. It involves defining what we mean by a better government, telling stories of innovation, and finally creating spaces for experimentation and learning. She'll also lead a discussion around how can we infuse more public-private partnerships to spur deeper culture change.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Those looking to build a grassroots, intrapreneur-focused movement with empathy and inclusivity. Those curious about, dabblers in and professionals in innovation/21st Century Government need attend.

In early 2018 California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced SB-827, Planning and Zoning: Transit-Rich Housing Bonus.This is a highly contentious bill with significant implications to California’s housing crisis. Policy Club, a small group of volunteers with experience in local government, public relations, and data science digitized the specifications of the bill including local zoning codes to map the potential impacts of the bill at the parcel level. Panelist will share their experiences moving from years of work in local gov and Code for America brigades to working on policy analysis and lobbying in Sacramento. Come if you're part of one of these groups today, or are thinking about starting or joining one. Let's all learn together, and only make new mistakes!

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone curious about state policy, or how data might be used in policy processes in general for estimating and measuring impacts.

How Can You Measure Your Criminal Justice System? All Of It!

LED BY:

Steve Spiker, Data Evangelist, Measures for Justice

DESCRIPTION:

Six years ago we were told that no-one could ever unlock and publish criminal justice system data for the USA, and that no-one would ever agree on standard measures. Today we have six entire states published, from arrest, to courts, to supervision, and we're adding more fast; we’ll have 20 states live by 2020. We're making open data in an opaque system with stakeholders across the country, and we're building open source tools as we go.

We will cover the process of getting agreement on the measures that illustrate a complex system, our massive data collection process, and our pipeline for processing these vast data into meaningful measures. We will show some of our soon to be released open source tech products that MfJ has built to do this work, from scraping, to data matching, and coding charges to align across counties and states. We’ll walkthrough our data portal and the ways we visualize these data, along with free data downloads. This session will also touch on innovative legislation that is making transparency in the criminal justice system a reality.

Lastly we’ll have a discussion about the ways you use, and wish to use criminal justice data in your communities and ways we might be able to work with your municipality.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

City, county and state government staff with an interest in the Criminal Justice system, as well as advocates who need these data. Secondary audience is technologists looking for new tools and data to use.

How to Recruit and Hire More Design & Tech Talent

LED BY:

Ben Guhin, Head of Design & Technology Policy, City of AustinMarni Wilhite, Head of Product, City of Austin

DESCRIPTION:

In June 2016, the City of Austin launched its Design, Technology, and Innovation Fellows program to bring design and technology experts from the private sector to serve tours of duty as city employees. Over the next 18 months, they hired over 35 specialists in user research, interaction design, engineering, product management, and content strategy, allowing them to build agile, multidisciplinary teams to improve outcomes for residents around recycling, permitting, homelessness, public safety, and digital services infrastructure.

Join two of the founders of Austin’s program as they share practical next steps for improving your recruiting and hiring processes. Among other areas, they’ll speak to how to write and publish positions descriptions that inspire more applicants, how to get the attention of your design and technology communities about opportunities, how to conduct interviews that really assess whether someone will be a great fit in government, and how to to get applicants to take the plunge and accept the most meaningful job they’ll ever have.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone in state or local government who’s looking to recruit and hire more design and technology talent
CTO/CIOs.

Dawn McDougall, Brigade NAC/Code for PhillyTim Wisniewski, Chief Data Officer and Director of the Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation, City of PhiladelphiaLauren Lockwood, Former Chief Digital Officer, City of Boston Nina Kin, Brigade NAC/Hack for LA, Mateo Clark, Senior Application Developer, City of AustinJill Bjers, Code for CharlotteKeri Shearer, IT Decision Analytics Manager, City of Charlotte

DESCRIPTION:

Brigades across the country want to help improve the way government works and add capacity, but local government often struggles to utilize this help. This panel-style talk focuses on the process by which Brigades and cities/regions can collaborate for right-sized impact. The discussion will center on some of the straightforward challenges government faces and the many ways that Brigades can be helpful to government outside of delivering software. We will also surface some of the stickier challenges that persist and ways that some Brigades have attempted to meet those harder challenges. For municipal and state governments currently without a Brigade, we'll touch on ways that civic tech communities have formed from the groundswell of energy around civic engagement. This panel will be instructive for Brigades and cities/regions while also providing insight for state-level government.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Brigade members, government leaders and staffers at all levels looking to improve their civic infrastructures through collaboration

Blameless Post-Mortems

LED BY:

John Allspaw, Co-Founder, Adaptive Capacity Labs & Former CTO, Etsy

DESCRIPTION:

Incidents in such as outages represent valuable opportunities to understand how your systems actually behave (as opposed how you imagine they do). When performed well, post-incident debriefings (sometimes called "post-mortems") can shed critically-important light on many different aspects of these important events. This session will cover some techniques and necessary conditions to make the best use of time in a post-incident debriefing and analysis program.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone (technical or not!) working in a software-reliant organization whose service depends on applications and systems working reliably.
CTO/CIOs.

Industry Standards: What Criteria Should Governments Use When Evaluating Vendors?

If we are going to build a government tech market for the digital age, we must clarify a set of standards that support the kinds of inter-operable, sustainable, resilient technologies we value. How should people procuring technology for government at the state and local levels think about selecting contractors/ suppliers? Using a values-based approach, we'll workshop a set of baseline evaluation criteria and explore contracting strategies- with the goals of supporting accountable and efficient procurement, preventing bad actors from abusing the public trust, foregrounding companies who make commitments to ethical services, and broadening the vendor pool to include startups and small businesses.

The Legacy Infrastructure is Dead, Long Live the Legacy Infrastructure

Interfacing with legacy IT systems is a fact of life for most Government entities — you don’t always have the time, resources, or authority to rip everything up and start from scratch. How, then, do you design and implement systems using modern languages and design principles while weighed down by decades of acquired habit and vintage infrastructure? We don’t have all the answers to this challenging question, but we need to have the conversation. Join the City of Boston and Nuna, a health-tech startup working with Medicare and Medicaid, in a panel discussion on technical, organizational, and cultural approaches to solving these challenges. We’ll start with a few brief case studies of ways to successfully work alongside or evolve away from legacy systems, and will then open up the discussion to broader themes.

Open enrollment for HealthCare.gov. Veteran appeals legislation mandated by Congress to go into effect on February 14, 2019. How do agile teams delivering public services plan for hard deadlines?

In this workshop, facilitators Gina Kim from United States Digital Services and Xena Ni, former Code for America fellow and designer at Nava PBC, will share what they learned planning for a Congressionally mandated deadline. They will show you how to lead interactive planning and prioritization exercises that you can use to reframe and prepare for your own team's deadlines. Bring your real life upcoming deadlines and leave with an action plan.

For open source, civic-focused projects to thrive and benefit society in a positive way, they must engage with contributors of both a technical and non-technical nature. Civic and societal problems are not solved with technical infrastructure alone. Rather, useful solutions come from diverse teams of technologists, stakeholders, and every day citizens impacted by the problem. Hear from leading technologists who are spearheading civic open source projects that unite stakeholders from across spectrums – from government and tech-based companies; to social impact organizations. They will discuss their experiences, what they've seen in both the civic tech and broader tech community, and actionable steps CfA Brigade members can take to better activate their own community of contributors.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Open source is at the heart of almost everything we do, and so all attendees can find value in this session. However, more specifically: regular open source contributors, project leaders, lead developers/contributors, and those wishing to expand their organizations’ engagement with open source will find the most value in this session.

Collaboration in Modern GovTech: The Power of Cross-Sectoral Partnerships

Government change-makers throughout the country are leveraging modern technology and cross-sectoral partnerships to improve services and bring more value to their communities. Using research, programs, and processes developed by Code for America, Startup In Residents and others, governments are collaborating with technology vendors to bake these best practices into their products and services. Come see how governments, govtech companies, and non-profits have partnered to produce powerful results and learn how you can bring these same approaches back to your organization.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Government employees and elected officials, Brigade members, non-profit companies and advocates, commercial vendors.

Thursday, May 31st4:30pm - 5:30pm

Staying in Government During Hard Times: A Group Therapy Session

LED BY:

Kathy Pham, former product lead and founding team member of the United States Digital Service
Jenn Halen, political scientist and government technology researcher, University of Minnesota and Harvard Berkman Klein Center

DESCRIPTION:

The ability to work in our government and influence change at levels ranging from local to federal is a privilege that not everyone in the world has. Regardless of who is in power or what decisions are made at the top, it is still our government to build, fight for, and sustain. Come for a talk and moderated discussion to share stories about staying in government during hard times.

This talk provides examples of how to use real-world experimental or survey data in decision making. The first step is to interpret the data correctly, which can be inherently difficult since many experiments have underlying biases. We will discuss how to deal with these biases and share tips for avoiding common mistakes when dealing with data. Furthermore, we will discuss how AI algorithms can be used to make practical decisions even when we are limited to small labeled data sets, such as data from surveys.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

This talk will have technical elements. Familiarity with basic data analysis concepts is helpful but not necessary for learning the techniques presented.

When fires broke out in Northern California in the fall of 2017, Sonoma county officials sprung to action with alerts on fire outbreaks and evacuations. However, those who evacuated still lacked information about shelter availability, route closures, pharmacies, and more.
To fill this void, a team of volunteers launched Sonoma Fire Info, a lightweight, bilingual, responsive mobile application with a companion SMS subscription service for residents to get critical information. Sonoma Fire Info combined city alerts with first hand accounts from over 60 volunteers who were on the road visiting shelters. The data became so accurate that hospitals and news organizations used the service a primary source of information.

In this presentation, Sonoma Fire Info and Twilio will discuss how experience from serving 128,000 web users and 1,700 text subscribers during the Bay Area fires can inform the future of community and government collaboration in disaster response.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

City officials working in emergency response or crisis management, nonprofits, developers, and other people who want to support disaster response communications.

This session offers advice from recent experiences implementing consumer facing technology - such as text messaging, mobile apps, and chat functions – in the health and human services sector to increase consumer/citizen satisfaction and make the enrollment process more user-friendly. Panelists will share key highlights from a newly released guide of Do’s and Don’ts for health and human services agencies and advocates on implementing consumer-facing technology solutions. Please come prepared to share your own recommendations.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

State and local agency staff and citizen/client advocates

Local Innovation and National Scale. How Can We Spread Local Solutions and Increase Cross-City Collaboration?

Over the past decade, the focus on building innovation capacity at the local level of government has led to a wealth of new approaches, resources, and tools to address some of our most critical challenges as a nation. However, only a handful of these novel solutions and approaches ever truly spread beyond their initial home to a broader set of cities. This panel will explore promising approaches for scaling innovations across cities, and tackle the challenges that arise in moving from awareness to implementation.

A Conversation on How this Civic Pioneer Modernized from Legacy to Modern to Agile Apps

Building resilient and usable systems requires a balancing act between responding to the needs of technical systems and users. This session shares practices and principles that helped the GetCalFresh engineering team scale and improve their service. We'll discuss practical implementations of "Leave a Seam" (creating paths within a system for people talk to you) and daily and weekly operations rituals for keeping technical teams oriented towards meeting the needs of users and technical systems.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Brigade members, government leaders and staffers at all levels looking to improve their civic infrastructure.

Using Discovery Sprints to Change Policy with People-Centered Policymaking

LED BY:

Crystal Yan, Experience Designer, United States Digital Service - HHS Liz Odar, Digital Services Expert, United States Digital Service - DHS
Jessica Weeden, Digital Services Expert, United States Digital Service - DHSJudy Siegel, Digital Service Expert, United States Digital Service - VA

DESCRIPTION:

Beyond changing interfaces, user research can be used to influence big decisions. In this panel, we'll go over a few case studies that will illustrate how and when to use user research to work with lawmakers on people-centered policy making in the public sector, methods that comprise of using user research and paper prototyping to change how government leaders view current processes, and inspiring them to change the law. Attendees will learn how to use different communication techniques for presenting user research to senior government officials (as opposed to product and engineering stakeholders) through examples from several projects in the United States Digital Service portfolio.

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly: Best practices and pitfalls as a government contractor

As modern software development finds its footing in the government contracting sphere, we're seeing the value of current technology being utilized to address previously intractable problems. As gratifying as it is, working with government agencies and contractors has unique challenges, but we're navigating them and so can you! Join us to learn about the best practices, dangers, and impact of modernizing government software.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

People who currently work with the Federal government or would like to work with the Federal government.

Diversity and Inclusion Made it to the Mainstream: Now what?

LED BY:

Nicole Sanchez, CEO and Founder, Vaya Consulting

DESCRIPTION:

For the last several years, Silicon Valley diversity and inclusion (D&I) has dominated headlines. More than ever, companies understand that D&I is a vital part of a healthy and successful company. But despite the best of intentions, we’ve seen very little progress. Why aren’t we seeing success in D&I at the scale and speed that we have come to expect from Silicon Valley? When can we go beyond talk and really build sustainable and innovative best practices for D&I? In this talk, NicoleSanchez, CEO and Founder of tech’s leading D&I firm, Vaya Consulting, will talk about where D&I is going next and how companies can move beyond rhetoric and into action.

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Friday, June 1st1:30pm - 2:30pm

Difficult Data, Difficult Discussions

LED BY:

Eric Jackson, Digital Services Architect, City of Asheville

DESCRIPTION:

We often prefer to focus on the more upbeat uses of open data, like powering entrepreneurship, informing the public, and improving government services. But the data that garner the most interest can also be data that touch on deep divisions in our communities: issues of policing, of economic and racial disparity, and of the best uses of our scarce resources. Putting the data out there invites the community to use it to challenge what government is doing.

We faced such challenges in Asheville in 2017, with data-centered discussions of arrests of homeless members of our community and racial disparities in traffic stops. Code for Asheville members were in the thick of it, both as members of the community and members of City staff. In this session, we’ll talk about that experience and then lead a conversation on ways to turn difficult discussions about difficult data into constructive engagement that helps our communities move forward.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Government staff, community activists, and brigade members working in areas where data-driven conversation is both needed and challenging (e.g., policing, economic development, housing, transportation, etc.)

We often prefer to focus on the more upbeat uses of open data, like powering entrepreneurship, informing the public, and improving government services. But the data that garner the most interest can also be data that touch on deep divisions in our communities: issues of policing, of economic and racial disparity, and of the best uses of our scarce resources. Putting the data out there invites the community to use it to challenge what government is doing.

We faced such challenges in Asheville in 2017, with data-centered discussions of arrests of homeless members of our community and racial disparities in traffic stops. Code for Asheville members were in the thick of it, both as members of the community and members of City staff. In this session, we’ll talk about that experience and then lead a conversation on ways to turn difficult discussions about difficult data into constructive engagement that helps our communities move forward.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Government staff, community activists, and brigade members working in areas where data-driven conversation is both needed and challenging (e.g., policing, economic development, housing, transportation, etc.)

Keeping Users at the Forefront While Scaling Services

LED BY:

Ben Sheldon, Engineering Manager, Code for America

DESCRIPTION:

Building resilient and usable systems requires a balancing act between responding to the needs of technical systems and users. This session shares practices and principles that helped the GetCalFresh engineering team scale and improve their service. We'll discuss practical implementations of "Leave a Seam" (creating paths within a system for people talk to you) and daily and weekly operations rituals for keeping technical teams oriented towards meeting the needs of users and technical systems.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Technical, engineering and operations staff, design and product managers, and anyone involved in building or managing technical products and systems.

Building working communities is hard. It’s a different skill than building a software system, but it’s still building a system and our system design training will apply. Furthermore, there is a deep connection between the technologies we create and the capabilities we empower as a result in our communities. Working at the nexus of government, government contractors, and communities is a difficult needle to thread, but a necessary one if the government will be “by the people and for the people” in this digital age. This presentation covers a few precepts: use storytelling to lead, ensure your technology empowers the engagement, anticipating the case where “it all goes wrong”, and how does this apply to my project.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

People working with a Brigade, working on a federal contract, and/or working with/on an open source project. Any place where the folks (primarily engineers, we imagine) need to turn their systems building skills toward building a community collected around a central goal/project.

Only New Mistakes: Starting and Running a Digital Service

LED BY:

Chris Govias, Chief of Design, The Canadian Digital Service Eman El-Fayomi, Senior User Experience AdvisorKendra Skeene, Director of Product, GeorgiaGov Interactive Carrie Bishop, Chief Digital Services Officer, City and County of San FranciscoLouise Downe, Director of Design and Service Standards, UK Government DIgital ServicesMatt Cutts, Acting Administrator, United States Digital Service

DESCRIPTION:

Since the UK started the Government Digital Service in 2010, we've seen the US Digital Service, and 18F follow suit at the federal level, with Georgia (and soon California) at the state level, and a handful of cities including San Francisco, Asheville also taking the plunge. Now the Canadian Digital Service is the latest initiative to reshape government services. Each of these offers incredible learning opportunities for those who follow, and each is doing their best to learn from what has gone before. Across these efforts, the challenges are familiar: to build digital capability throughout the entirety of government, all while managing risk, aversion to change, and ensuring we only make new mistakes. Come if you're part of one of these groups today, or are thinking about starting or joining one. Let's all learn together, and only make new mistakes!

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone working within digital government will find the case studies and lessons learned both relevant and interesting; that said, individuals in the process of starting or joining a digital service (nascent or otherwise) will find the session of particular use.

Research and Design for CA Child Welfare: Wins and Challenges from the Field

Learn how governments use blockchain technologies and permissioned ledgers to deliver services. This session will introduce Hyperledger, The Linux Foundation's open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. We will also present a number of existing use case tutorials that showcase service delivery using Hyperledger projects. The session will conclude with an interactive discussion with the audience about how they consider using blockchain technologies and common challenges to overcome.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anyone interested in learning more about blockchain at either a technical or business level is encouraged to attend. This talk will have technical elements, although it will be accessible to any skill level. More technical discussions can continue at the Technology Fair.

Agile is Dead, Long Live Agile

LED BY:

Zachary Auerbach, Senior Software Engineer, Code for America

DESCRIPTION:

Join us for a in-depth discussion of agile/extreme-programming processes intended for both technical and non-technical attendees. How can product managers, engineers, designers, and other stakeholders work together to improve their process for building and delivering software? Using the ClientComm team as case study, we'll discuss what works, what doesn't, and how this learning contributes to the larger sphere of public sector service delivery. Topics include: pair programming, test-driven development, continuous deployment (automated production code deploy), the PM-designer-engineer feedback cycle, and the importance of emotional empathy in the development of software.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Anybody interested the process of how software gets built will be welcome at this session. Non-technical stakeholders like PMs, program managers, and designers, are especially encouraged to attend, as a core focus of our discussion will be how a holistic product team integrates technical and non-technical expertise.

Defying the Limits of Tech, Data & Design: Women of Color Data Scientists Cast An Unbiased Vision of the Future

This panel will examine how communities of color are using AI, data science, and qualitative research to better understand and design civic tech/govtech environments and public policy that directly benefit communities of color and cast a deliberate vision of civil society driven by unbiased data and design.

How can your organization use data and analytics to elevate the experience of users and improve government services? During this session, hear how taking a design-led approach that blends human-centered design and advanced analytics solves complex, at scale challenges. Then dive into a fast-paced, interactive workshop to discover new ways to gain real world insight and tell high-impact stories that bring complex data to life for diverse stakeholders and executive decision-makers.

Friday, June 1st2:45pm - 3:45pm

Customer Selection and Product Roadmapping for the Government Technology Market

LED BY:

Mitchell Weiss, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School

DESCRIPTION:

What makes great government buyers? Government technology sellers want to find them and innovative government leaders want to be them. But how? This session will cover customer selection and product roadmapping for the government technology market. It will leverage a Harvard Business School case study on Mark43 for an energetic and participatory conversation. Scott Crouch and his team at Mark43 had barely finished rolling out their new police records management system in Washington D.C. in late summer 2015, when the prospect of an even bigger customer surfaced: the Los Angeles Police Department’s RFP for a new RMS in L.A. would hit the street soon. Should Mark43 bid on it? Attendees in this session will debate Mark43’s options and, along the way, cover techniques for:

Sizing government technology markets

Weighing small market customers vs. the largest ones

Uncovering who, exactly, within government organizations to sell to

Evaluating new RFP opportunities and the openness to new players

Scaling government market sales organizations as they grow

Moving From an In-House CMS to Drupal at the City of Bloomington

LED BY:

Cliff Ingham, Systems and Applications Manager, City of Bloomington

DESCRIPTION:

In 2017 we re-launched the City of Bloomington's public website (bloomington.in.gov). While any website migration is difficult, the transition from a custom in-house CMS to Drupal came with a lot of challenges and considerations. This presentation reflects on the lessons learned in launching a new website essentially from the ground up while managing your existing web presence.

Ben Guhin, Head of Design & Technology Policy, City of Austin
Marni Wihite, Head of Product, City of Austin

DESCRIPTION:

You’ve probably noticed that designers and developers are looking for a slightly different work environment than the typical government employee. Well, that’s an understatement. In many cases, they’re looking for a very different environment, and the City of Austin has been prototyping new ways of supporting creative teams while hiring over 35 design and technology specialists from the private sector in just 18 months.

Join two of the leaders of Austin’s transformation and learn how it’s possible to do this in local government and the many aspects of creative culture that should be top-of-mind as you introduce new people, projects, and processes into your city.

Cookie Swap: Bring Your Things that Worked Making Digital Service

LED BY:

Laura Kadamus, Digital Services Expert, United States Digital Service

DESCRIPTION:

Bring your tasty treats that worked in building and running digital services teams. Playbooks, hiring processes, tactics, culture artifacts, team structures, songs, whatever. But present your winning tactics to others in the room, and make sure you have a way of sharing them with others who'd like to borrow and/or adapt them. This is a unique interactive session format in which everyone leaves with goodies! (virtual ones at least!)

How Agile Methods Help Non-Technical Government Teams Get Things Done

LED BY:

Michelle Thong, Service Innovation Lead, City of San Jose Alvina Nishimoto, Agile Coach, City of San JoseErica Garaffo, Data Analytics Lead, City of San JoseRamses Madou, Transportation Planning Manager, City of San Jose
CJ Ryan, Program Manager, City of San Jose

DESCRIPTION:

Throughout the City of San Jose, from Parks to Transportation, non-technical government teams are adopting Agile methods such as Scrum and Kanban. Though these methods were originally developed in the manufacturing and software industries, they can be applied in government to establish the virtuous habits of prioritizing, collaborating, and staying aligned as a team. In this panel, we'll provide an introduction to Agile methods, share our lessons learned, and give you tips on how to get started with your own team.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Non-technical government staff, but it’s relevant for anyone who wants to help their teams work better and smarter, whether in government or not, whether technical or not. wonks and dreamers welcome.

Building a Sustainable Future for Public Services

LED BY:

Lou Downe, Director of Design for the UK Government

DESCRIPTION:

The U.K. Government Digital Service (GDS) started 6 years ago is far from done. To keep our promise of government truly working better for users, we must transform everything involved in how government designs and delivers services - not just front-end interactions. From technology to operational delivery, from the way policy is created to the way different parts of government work (or don’t work) together.

In this breakout, learn from Lou Downe, Director of Design for the UK Government as they go into more detail about what’s needed to fundamentally change how government works, and the critical role that design and design standards play.

Designing Government Platforms for Reliability, Trust and Safety and More

How can governments foster environments that focus on users and find better ways for users to use and get information about benefits? What are the models for platform operating costs? Who has what liability in event of data breach - government, the platform vendor(s), third party clients or more? How do we design for user trust? Join a breakout panel discussion with California’s Health and Human Services Agency and departments and help explore the issues.

Too often, people who need the most help finding work are stuck using antiquated tools and methods to get there. This session is all about designing and implementing a workforce system where job seekers and employers are equipped with the best possible tools to achieve their goals. Presenters will share stories about how new technologies are improving the efficiency and efficacy of workforce programs and job centers, while sharing the areas where technology alone cannot solve the problem. They'll discuss how the workforce system can anticipate and act proactively given the changes in the economy and world of work. You'll leave with a better understanding of the challenges faced by the workforce systems and ideas you can take home and put into action tomorrow, next month, and next year.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

This session would be ideal for anyone who is interested in re-envisioning the role that government can play in the workforce space. Government staff, service providers, policy wonks and dreamers welcome.